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Cinderella fruit: Wild delicacies become cash crops

By Charlie Pye-Smith

IF YOU had come here 10 years ago, says Thaddeus Salah as he shows us round his tree nursery in north-west Cameroon, you would have seen real hunger and poverty. “In those times,” he says, “we didn’t have enough chop to eat.” It wasn’t just food – “chop” in the local dialect – that his family lacked. They couldn’t afford school fees, healthcare or even chairs for their dilapidated grass-thatch house.

Salah’s fortunes changed in 2000 when he and his neighbours learned how to identify the best wild fruit trees and propagate them in a nursery. “Domesticating wild fruit like bush mango has changed our lives,” he says. His family now has “plenty chop”, as he puts it. He is also earning enough from the sale of indigenous fruit trees to pay school fees for four of his children. He has been able to re-roof his house with zinc sheets and buy goods he could only dream of owning before. He even has a mobile phone.

From Salah’s farm we gaze across the intensively cultivated hills which roll away towards the Nigerian border. “Ten years ago, you’d hardly see any safou [African plum, Dacryodes edulis] in this area,” says Zachary Tchoundjeu, a botanist at the World Agroforestry Centre‘s regional office in the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé. “Now you see them growing everywhere.”

The spread of African plum through these hills is one small part of a bigger movement that could change the lives of millions of Africans. The continent is home to some 3000 species of wild fruit tree, many of which are ripe for domestication. Chocolate berries, …